No matter what industry you’re in, once you’re looking to grow and take success to the next level, you’re no longer a real estate agent, lawyer, builder, baker, or business consultant. You’re a marketer. And your product is you.
The fate of your business lies not just in offering the best real estate services but in your ability to market your services. A transaction takes place when, in the mind of the consumer, the value of the service you’re selling outweighs the price you’re asking.
Your focus as a marketer should be on intimately knowing your market and your prospects’ deepest desires, pains, fears, hopes, and dreams.
You need to know them better than any of your competitors, and then attract the right types of clients by effectively communicating how you can deliver. And this should be the basis for generating leads, following up on leads, and closing deals.
The 4 per cent rule for moving the marketing needle
You might have heard about the 80/20 Rule, commonly called the Pareto principle. An economist, Pareto found a disproportionate relationship between cause and effect.
For example, 20 per cent of the input creates 80 per cent of the result, 20 per cent of the workers produce 80 per cent of the result, and 20 per cent of the customers generate 80 per cent of the revenue – and so on.
But most people never truly apply this principle to their business let alone other areas of their life. I’ve found his 80/20 rule to hold true over almost all areas of business, including:
- sources of incoming leads
- reasons clients engage your services
- activities in your business that produce revenue
In business, the little stuff kills the big stuff. What I mean is there are lots of small, nit-picky things in your business constantly screaming for attention, but these aren’t the tasks that produce revenues.
When I started to apply this in my business, revenues skyrocketed. To give you an example, here were my regular activities:
- Checking emails
- Writing copy
- Speaking with clients
- Having meetings
- Creating Facebook ads
- Checking stats
- Creating systems and processes
- Coming up with offers and promotions
- Training/on-boarding staff
- Creating sales funnels
- Sending emails
- Shooting videos
- Recruiting
- Running errands
- Making webinars
- Creating proposals
- Scheming and plotting
- Setting up systems
- Looking at analytics
- Public relations/interviews.
The 80/20 Rule demonstrates you could potentially disregard 80 per cent of your business activities.
They should either be delegated or outsourced so you can focus on the top 20 per cent high yielding, revenue producing activities.
Once you’ve done this in your business, you need to take it one step further and truly become a high-performance business owner.
You see, you should apply the 80/20 Rule to the 80/20 Rule itself. That is to say, 80 per cent of the 80 per cent of the revenue comes from 20 per cent of the 20 per cent of your revenue-producing activities.
To put it more simply, 4 per cent of your activities create 64 per cent of the revenue in your business
In my business, after rationalising the 96 per cent of my activities that produced little or no revenue, this is what my top 4 per cent revenue producing activities looked like:
• Writing sales copy
• Coming up with offers and promotions
• Creating sales funnels
• Shooting videos
• Doing webinars
• Scheming and plotting
• Very select media interviews.
Because these 4 per cent of activities literally bring in 64 per cent of all the revenue for my business, I hired an operations manager and other team leaders to do all the other things that don’t move the money needle.
So, what are your top 4 per cent revenue-producing activities?
As a real estate agent, you need to be getting leads, following up on leads, and closing deals.
You should be running campaigns for lead generation and implementing campaigns to follow up and nurture leads.
We have seen high-converting sales inquiries increase by as much as 900 per cent for our real estate clients like Marshall White by creating automated lead generation and nurturing campaigns.
For example, the first thing someone thinks when they consider selling their home is, “How much is my property worth?”.
Offering a free appraisal is common-place but people don’t necessarily want someone in their home and then to be followed up. People can find that very threatening.
Instead, position yourself as an expert with a digital neighbourhood price guide. Everyone that downloads the information is then sent a series of educational tips like ‘how to increase the value of your property’.
After a while, you can invite them to speak to you. This builds trust, demonstrates your real estate expertise, and avoids starting the relationship in a confronting way.
How can you move the money needle and maximise your time?
Instead of calling everyone you are sending information to, consider investing in automation telling you who is actually opening the information via an email, so you are only spending your time following up the warmest leads.
You shouldn’t invest your time on low-value tasks, because every minute you spend on low-value tasks or putting out fires is time taken away from the areas of your business that have the most leverage and largest potential to make you money.
Remember, only 4 per cent of your activities each day drive your firm forward and move the money needle. The other 96 per cent of the things still have to get done, but maybe they shouldn’t get done by you.
